The apocalyptic story of Gog and Magog spread widely in the Orient as well as through the Christian world. In the East, curiously enough, it was made a part of the Romance of Alexander. We read in the Koran[310] that the “two-horned Alexander” built a great wall of bronze and pitch and brimstone, behind which he enclosed the wild peoples of Yajūj and Mājūj (Gog and Magog) until they should break forth on the day of the Last Judgment. This story was probably told for the first time in connection with Alexander the Great by Procopius in his _De bello Persico_.[311] It formed one of the most important parts of the immensely popular work, the _Pseudo-Methodius_, which foretold with considerable detail the events of the Last Day.[312] It entered into later versions of the Romance of Alexander itself, although it formed no part of the versions of the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_ or of the translation of Julius Valerius.[313] _Romance of Alexander the Great_ The Romance of Alexander, one of the most widely known of the various cycles of medieval legend, deserves some comment here because the scene of most of Alexander’s exploits was laid in Asia. The Romance contains some fantastic geographical details concerning the East in general and India in particular. The classical stories of the monsters and marvels of these mysterious lands are here preserved in attractive form. We meet with Amazons and mermaids, griffons, and men who live on the smell of spices. We have a text of correspondence between Alexander and the Brahmin king, Dindimus, in which the latter explains to the Macedonian conqueror his religion and the simple habits of the Brahmins.[314] _St. Thomas in India_ India was also supposed in the Middle Ages to have been visited by St. Thomas, the Apostle,[315] who was said to have built therein a great castle for King Gundophorus. Though little geography is to be gleaned from the apocryphal legends of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew in India and of St. Matthew in Ethiopia, they served to carry the reader’s mind to distant corners of the earth and are of passing interest to us because certain elements of the story of St. Thomas became part of the fabric of the great twelfth-century legend of Prester John. If we are to believe the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_,[316] an Englishman visited India in the ninth century, for we are told that King Alfred sent a certain Sighelm to the shrines of Saints Thomas and Bartholomew in A. D. 883. AFRICA Africa was utterly neglected. Unlike Asia, it did not become the habitat of legend and fable. Supposedly of small extent and made up mostly of desert, it failed to arouse much interest until long after our period. The universal testimony of cosmographer and cartographer during the entire age under consideration was to the effect that the African continent stops well to the north of the equator at the borders of the sea.